3/05/2010 @ 12:01AM

Trouble In Turkey

If you try to talk over the phone to people in Turkey about their current government, they will likely refuse to do so. The ruling pro-Islamic AK Party is now tapping phones so liberally that everyone is paranoid. Apparently over 100,000 people have been wiretapped, thousands arrested and questioned–some 200 reporters, intellectuals, academics and military officers remain in jail, accused of plotting a military coup. Many others are terrified that their conversations, edited and distorted, will pop up on Web sites or pro-government media. Even the Joint Chiefs of Staff found that snippets of his closed-door meetings with fellow officers had leaked to a pro-Islamic Web site. (He was caught complaining of a media campaign against the armed forces–shock, horror!)

Prime Minister Erdogan seems hell-bent on softening up the military and its secularist sympathizers. At this point, no one with any sense trusts in the government’s motives, that of pre-empting an old-fashioned military coup of the kind that occurred four times in 50 years in post-war Turkey. In fact nobody really believes the military would attempt such a maneuver anymore. It would destroy Turkey’s already slim chances of entering the E.U. The generals believe in one thing above all–that Turkey’s future lies in a westward direction. They deplore the Islamist pull of Erdogan’s party but a coup would scramble the country’s democratic evolution altogether.

Erdogan’s party apparently suffers from no comparable reservations over scrambling the future of democracy in Turkey. Like the generals of old, he’s all about destroying the system in order to save it. The generals, though, always stuck to their word–they invariably restabilized the country and handed it back to the corrupt, inept, irresponsible politicians.

Like all populists, Erdogan sees enemies everywhere. If they’re not there, he will certainly create them. There’s a constant hysteria in the land about threats to the Constitution, to religion, to strategic territory with irreplaceable sources of water or raw materials sold to secret American or Israeli companies. Dubious documents appear ‘proving’ this or that conspiracy, including the most recent one, a 5,000-word memo showing the army plotting 9/11-style attacks on buildings. Meanwhile, of course, money from the Muslim or Gulf countries enters the body politic and the coffers of AK Party loyalists apace.

Throughout Erdogan’s rise to power, you couldn’t get a single Western commentator living in Turkey or outside to raise alarms over his methods or motives. They understood only this: Erdogan equals the popular will, secularists equal the old Westernized elite. After all, he keeps getting voted in, they said. Alas, now, as he embraces Syria, Iran, Sudan and Russia, the bien pensant voices of the West have begun to falter, all too late. Chavez, too, was elected by popular vote. So was Putin. As populists do, they did to political opponents and opposition media exactly what Erdogan is doing. Erdogan has been very clever about creating a theater of crisis in which a vote against him meant a vote for military coups, Israeli influence, American imperialism or headscarf bans or somesuch.

Meanwhile, slowly, inexorably, he has set about infusing religion into the state’s arteries: early closings of government offices on Fridays, Ramadan schedules universally observed and the like. That he hasn’t yet imposed Islamic protocols on national education curriculums and the judiciary and television programming is not through lack of desire. The country’s secular institutions have resisted him every inch of the way. But now he is using the police against the army–an extraordinary schism in the roots of any state–and the rest cannot be far behind.

In the midst of this critical moment comes the Armenian genocide resolution in the U.S. Congress, as it does around this time most years. Discretion the better part of valor, I will leave to others the debate over who did what to whom a century ago. What does it mean for the present–for Turkey and for U.S. interests in the region, should such a bill pass? First off, most Turks believe that the battle over the historical record is really a battle over who gets to keep the eastern part of Turkey, where Armenians lived until WWI.

To draw an obvious parallel, if a legally binding resolution were passed that many American Indians perished from genocide, the U.S. would face questions of reparations and restitution of lands ranging from Oklahoma City to the prairies to upstate New York. With the Armenian bill, Turks would simply interpret Congress’ actions as a prelude to dismembering their country, something that the British, Russians, Arabs, and separatist Kurds have tried to do from the post-Ottoman era onward.

Erdogan, of course, has only himself to blame as he has cozied up to U.S. foes in the region while histrionically alienating Israel. One could argue that absent sympathetic support for Turkey among American Jews in the past, the genocide bill would have passed long ago. Now Erdogan has put paid to that resource. But isn’t this exactly what populist despots always do–they drive their country into a corner and proceed to impose their iron rule unhindered from outside?

Here’s a likely scenario: The bill passes, Erdogan declares a suspension of NATO, the U.S. faces a bloc of obstinate naysaying from Russia, down through Iran and Turkey, to Syria and the Middle East. The resupply of troops and material to Iraq and Afghanistan gets infinitely harder and resistance in those countries gets revitalized. Iran gets nukes. The Islamic world tilts irrevocably away from Western influence. Life gets much harder for Israel. Russia has the leisure to refocus on Eastern Europe. The Black Sea becomes again a no-go area for NATO. Result: Ukraine’s coastline falls under Russian power and Ukraine is lost. Georgia–with Iran, Russia and Turkey as its neighbors–is also lost.

Within Turkey, the U.S. instantly becomes the enemy and the Turkish military gets bashed even harder for its history of alliance with Israel and the U.S. Under such conditions, the generals will not again summon the leverage to step in and realign the country’s course. For Erdogan, the secular impediments to his rule will fade under a barrage of Islamist propaganda. Sharia law will slowly seep into the court system. Secularists will be branded as American spies. You get the picture.

All this may sound alarmist in the extreme, but consider: Why is Erdogan bashing the military now? He must know that they present no danger. The rest of the country knows. At this point, the armed forces merely act as a bulwark against total transformation of the secular Constitution. If Erdogan didn’t have designs on that, why is he worried about the military? To carry out his long-term strategy of gradually Islamizing the country, Erdogan has identified himself as the embodiment of democracy, of the popular will, against threats from interventionists.

A spat with the U.S. is just what he needed. Now he can bond with all the regional paranoia emanating out of Moscow, Tehran and Damascus about American power. America becomes the constant threat to Turkish independence and to Turkey’s resuming its Ottoman-era role as a regional power, a leader of Islam. It will all take some years but no longer than it took Putin or Chavez. All of which is to say the obvious–that with the recurrent talk about passing the Armenian Genocide Bill, members of Congress are playing into Erdogan’s hands. Tasked with voting on what happened a century ago, they should think hard about what will happen today before they cast their votes.